Erik C. Andersen and his Avid
in his home editing suite.
(Photo by Gregory Schwartz)

While Zodiac garners
the headlines as the first Hollywood major
feature using an all-tapeless workflow,
another film is proving that a $2 million
feature can use the same techniques as one
costing $80 million more––and achieve the
same success in the cutting room, if not at
the box office. Killer Pad, a new
indie movie directed by Robert Englund
(Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm
Street fame) and produced by Wayne
Allan Rice, is a teen horror-comedy about
three friends who use a legal settlement to
purchase a house in the Hollywood Hills and
find out that it has a very checkered
history. At press time, the film was
negotiating a distribution deal.

Working under the
IA’s low-budget agreement, the editor, Erik
C. Andersen, came to the Thomson/ Grass
Valley Viper camera through DP David Stump,
ASC, who has a reputation for pushing
digital technology. According to Andersen,
the essentials of the Zodiac
workflow were duplicated on Killer Pad,
with some key differences necessitated by
budget.

Andersen is no
stranger to low-budget and independent
films. In fact, because he’s done several of
them, he bought himself an Avid and works at
home in his garage-turned-editing suite. It
is there that he cut the features Animal
(2005) and You Did What? (2006). He
also works on shorts for up-and-coming
filmmakers and has been doing supplemental
material for DVD releases.

Jim Garrett checks
the out of sync sound on the Final
Cut Pro editing system.

On Killer Pad,
which Andersen did not cut at home, he had
the services of only one assistant, Jim
Garrett––who for half the show had to share
the Final Cut Pro system with him. “I
persuaded the producers to get a second
system by convincing them that I could
handle double the amount of work if my
assistant had his own machine,” he says.

Andersen used the
sound on the D.Mag (digital film magazine)
as a work track, as opposed to the Cantar
audio files used on David Fincher’s movie.
“It was a huge problem because the sound was
out of sync anywhere between one to three
frames,” he recalls. “We waited to fix the
problem until we locked picture––then Jim
spent two weeks going through the entire
show, analyzing each shot to see how far off
it was and adjusting the sync accordingly.
It was a pain, but we really had no choice
than to do it that way.”

Script notes were
sent to Andersen on old-fashioned Xerox
copies, rather than embedded file-based
metadata. Not much of a problem there,
according to the editor. “Killer Pad
only shot the equivalent of 120,000 feet of
film, less than one-tenth the footage of
Zodiac,” he says. “It was not an
overwhelming amount of material to comb
through.”

As was the Zodiac editorial team,
Andersen was amazed at the time savings
provided by the DPX file workflow. “If a
D.Mag’s drives were filled during that
morning’s shooting, they would be sent to
editorial and I’d be cutting that material
by the afternoon,” he reveals. “Making it
easier was the fact that unlike film’s
one-light dailies, the LUTs gave us a much
closer representation of what the DP had in
mind when he shot the material. I’m an
editor, not a colorist, and this procedure
allowed me to cut with the best-looking
image.”

Andersen says he had
always heard that the main reason to shoot
in HD was to save money––and he heard right.
“By going tapeless, you eliminate film
stock, telecine, tape stock and other costly
processes,” he acknowledges. “The only way
left to save money now is to digitize
directly into the editing system on the
set.”

The best advice
Andersen offers to editors thinking about
working on a show with this kind of workflow
is for them to rely on their knowledge and
experience and ask the right questions
beforehand. “You have to know what’s coming
at you, especially if you’ve had past
experience with HD,” says Andersen, who was
first assistant editor on Universal’s first
HD movie, How
High, in 2001. “When you start a
project, get in there during pre-production
and ask questions of every department––‘How
are we doing camera reports?’ ‘Who’s
responsible for delivering the D.mags,’
etc.––so the workflow between departments is
figured out by the time you start shooting.”

Before Andersen
worked with the D.Mag, he was very hesitant
about a tapeless workflow. “But now that
I’ve seen first-hand how effective it is,
and how fast I can get my material to cut, I
know that this is here to stay,” he
enthuses. “The biggest question now is how
are the original dailies’ data going to be
saved? We backed up the DPX files onto
LTO-3, but technology is changing so
quickly, this could soon be obsolete.

“I feel that film
negative is still the best way to archive,”
he continues, and adds after a pause, “But
ask me in five years if my opinion has
changed!”